Priority: Wallpaper

By Scott Petersen | July 22, 2024 | Comments Off on Priority: Wallpaper
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CS Music Lab Background

I hereby confess that the “niceties” of a functional lab image have never been my priority. Part of a unified look-and-feel for any computer are the login-screen background, the default user wallpaper, and the lock screen background. In KDE Plasma 6 specifically, these are, eh, cartoonish. Regardless what one thinks of them, they certainly don’t…

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New Article: Pro Audio on Linux

By Scott Petersen | June 10, 2024 | Comments Off on New Article: Pro Audio on Linux
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Pro Audio on Linux

Like many of you, I keep an eye on r/linuxaudio for announcements, software updates, and generally to try to help people new to Linux audio when I can. To that end, I took a few hours and put together an introduction to pro audio on Linux here. I decided to host it on GitHub rather…

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Bad Pipewire! Bad KDE Linux!

By Scott Petersen | May 29, 2024 | Comments Off on Bad Pipewire! Bad KDE Linux!
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It’s the end of May, Spring is slowly giving way to Summer as the bees buzz around flowering trees and Pipewire is broken on KDE Linux again. It’s a poetic tale as old as time, well, at least as old as Pipewire. Or KDE Neon. Or both. (or maybe it’s just my janky old system…

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Multichannel Audio Devices and Linux (not a love story)

By Scott Petersen | August 15, 2023 | Comments Off on Multichannel Audio Devices and Linux (not a love story)
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Something has been bothering me for some time since moving to PipeWire on my Linux boxes, and that is the way multichannel audio devices are handled. As we all know (and loath), Linux audio is complicated and terrible, but the upshot is that it gives us a lot of control and the possibility of extremely low latency — critical to realtime audio recording, processing, programming, etc.

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Two SuperCollider FM Synthesis Projects

By Scott Petersen | April 8, 2023 | Comments Off on Two SuperCollider FM Synthesis Projects
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I just posted my second SuperCollider FM Synthesis project to GitHub, a pedagogical extension of a great DX7 “clone” for the SuperCollider language. The project allows users to enter DX7 presets, by number, and generate usable SynthDefs (SuperCollider synthesis instrument definitions) and analysis that provides insight into the nature of the instrument configuration. My previous…

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Running A University Linux-based Audio Lab: Part 5 — Nightmares and Light

By Scott Petersen | January 21, 2023 | Comments Off on Running A University Linux-based Audio Lab: Part 5 — Nightmares and Light
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Imaging a University lab is fun and profitable! Learn how!

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A Flawless Linux Audio Experience…

By Scott Petersen | November 30, 2022 | Comments Off on A Flawless Linux Audio Experience…
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I’m not just an emissary for Linux Audio, like everyone else who relies on it and extols its (few) virtues, I’m also its biggest detractor. So when you read “a flawless linux audio experience” you might think I’m trolling you, and in the distant past (say several months ago) you would definitely be correct. But…

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Pipewire and JACK on Arch Linux

By Scott Petersen | May 27, 2022 | Comments Off on Pipewire and JACK on Arch Linux
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This is a quick post to talk about my recent experience configuring Pipewire and JACK on Arch Linux. Now, I’m not an Arch adherent and maybe you aren’t either. That’s fine because I’ll talk about the minimal install and the packages that are required to get Pipewire and JACK working. This will not cover moving…

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It’s Worth Learning to do it Yourself

By Scott Petersen | May 5, 2022 | Comments Off on It’s Worth Learning to do it Yourself
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In this post I will attempt to convince you, dear friend, to take the hard way and learn to do whatever new/onerous thing you need to learn in order to facilitate your work, rather than relying on someone else to do it for you.

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Running A University Linux-based Audio Lab: Part 4 — Updates and Brokenness

By Scott Petersen | March 23, 2022 | Comments Off on Running A University Linux-based Audio Lab: Part 4 — Updates and Brokenness
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Part 1: Hosing Down your Computers In an earlier post about setting up and maintaining a Linux audio lab I wrote: Above I mentioned that cron-apt is used to check package status (daily) and use the email packages to email package status to the system admin (me). This, however, is not configured to auto update…

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